Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 August 1896 — JUST BEFORE THE COLLISION. [ARTICLE]

JUST BEFORE THE COLLISION.

Th« Thought* that Fla*h Through the Engine Man's Mind. A Rochester (X. Y.) Democrat and Chronicle reporter met a switchman the other day, the pathos of whose life was expressed in the wooden leg which he used, and as the Empire dashed by he looked up and said: “Yes, I like railroading. I hare been In the business all my life, and expect to spend the rest of my days over the rails, but 1 am quite content to remain here in my little cottage and tend to my flagging rather ihan hare the position of the man who bolds the throttle on that big engine which just whizzed by here. You may think it a snap to sit there and ride over the country at the rate of a mile a minute, but I tell you that man carries a load •f responsibility on his shoulders which the average man knows very little about. 1 know something of it, for I was fireman seme years ago on one of the fast engines, and lost my leg in an accident between here and Albany. But if I had come out of that accident as sound as you are I never should have been able to hold my nerve for any more fast trips. That finished me for that work.”

“Then if a man has been hurt in a railroad accident it makes him scary •f that kind of work, does it?” asked the reporter. “You bet it does,” answered the switchman with emphasis, “and don’t let any one fool you that it don't. The man who was running that engine the day I was hurt escaped with hardly a scratch, but he never could keep his time up the way he did before that, and finally was put on a freight, engine, where the running was a great deal slower. “I shall never forget the way he looked the afternoon the smash-up occurred. Just before the crash came I looked at him. We were rounding a curve down by Schenectady. His long gray hair was flowing in the breeze, his face set, and his eyes fixed on the track ahead. “All at once he jumped to his feet and reversed the lever and exclaimed in a startled tone, ‘My God, we are caught!’ It was probably not more than half a minute after when I was lying beneath the engine with my leg crushed, utterly unconscious of the fact that a great wreck had occurred, but every moment and occurrence of that half minute is as vividly im. pressed upon my mind as if it had taken weeks of time to impress it there. “As he spoke I looked through the cab window ahead of us, and there, within twenty rods, was a freight engine coming straight at us, and there was no possible chance to escape a crash. The engineer was doing his duty. I knew that. He was reversing the lever, applying the brakes, and doing his best to avert what he knew was inevitable, but I had nothing to do, and it seemed as if everything in my life was before me in those few seconds. I felt absolutely sure 1 was going to die. Strange as it may ■eem, the thought did not seem horrible to me. A whole lot of the slang sayings, such as, ‘You are learning to fire here in this world, so as to be prepared for the next,’ aqd ‘You won’t mind a hot job over there,’ and a number of those stale things which a fireman has to take, came into my head, and even in that awful position it occurred to me in a sort of humorous way that I had made a good start here below, or here above, as I might say. The next moment I was thinking of my wife and children, yes, and of mother, too, who had been dead a number of years. A man always thinks of his mother at such a time. But I don’t think I had. a particle of fear of death. The last thing that was on my mind was the question, Who was to blame for the accident? and that is the last I remember.

“When I came to my senses I was in a hospital and was minus a leg. Since then I have been continually employed one way and another by the railroad company, but I never see one of the fast trains go by without thinking of that wreck. The engineer miraculously escaped with scarcely a bruise, but it finished him for that kind of work. He was always seeing engines ahead of him after that, and I have heard that more than once he had slowed up his train in order not to collide with an imaginary engine, which I have no doubt was as real to him as it was on the afternoon the wreck I speak of occurred. As I said before, he was transferred •to a freight engine, but even there he was timid, and finally left the road altogether. “You can put it down as a pretty sure thing that when an engineer has been in an accident once he is minus a good share of the nerve which it takes to make his runs on time to the tick, and if he isn’t on time he has got to go, sooner or later.”